Greta Christina's Blog

Is Atheism What Makes Happy Atheists Happy?

I stumbled across this study that's been floating around the atheosphere (my new word for the atheist blogosphere), and since I think some people are getting it a bit wrong, I want to comment on it.

It's a study on atheism worldwide, comparing countries with high and low degrees of atheism and seeing… well, how those countries are doing. It's by Phil Zuckerman, Ph.D. titled Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns. (Sorry for the link to the cache; the original link was broken.)

Here's the article's summary, the bit that's been going around:

"In sum, countries marked by high rates of organic atheism ["organic" means "not forced by a dictatorial government" - GC] are among the most societally healthy on earth, while societies characterized by non-existent rates of organic atheism are among the most destitute. Nations marked by high degrees of organic atheism tend to have among the lowest homicide rates, infant mortality rates, poverty rates, and illiteracy rates, and among the highest levels of wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality in the world. The only indicator of societal health mentioned above in which religious countries fared better than irreligious countries was suicide."

An extremely interesting bit of data. Fascinating. Informative. Useful.

But since atheists and naturalists and skeptics are always yakking on about how correlation doesn't prove causation, I feel that we need to be extremely careful here -- and not jump to the conclusion that atheism makes people happy.

There's a flip side of this study that I've also seen, and it's very relevant to this question: In the U.S., the conservatively religious "red" states have higher rates of crime, divorce, etc. than the more liberal, less strictly religious "blue" states. Some atheists have used this data (which I can't find a link for now, sorry) to bolster their arguments that religion doesn't actually make people moral… and that in fact, it does the opposite.

But I think this is bass-ackwards. I think it's putting the cart before the horse, the effect before the cause.

I don't think atheism causes social health and prosperity.

I think it's the other way around.

And the author of this study agrees.

"I am in no way arguing that high levels of organic atheism cause societal health or that low levels of organic atheism cause societal ills such as poverty or illiteracy. If anything, the opposite argument should be made: societal health causes widespread atheism, and societal insecurity causes widespread belief in God." (Emphasis mine.)

If you think about it even for a second, it makes sense. If people are happy in this life, if they're healthy, well-fed, secure; if they have work they care about; if they feel connected to their society and feel that they have a stake and a say in it -- and if they have a fair expectation that their children will have the same -- there isn't anywhere near the same need for a belief in God and an afterlife.

And if people are poor and hungry and sick; if they do back-breaking labor with little or no hope of escape; if their society is corrupt and oppressive and they feel powerless to do anything about it -- and if life sucks for their children as much or more as it does for them -- then the need to believe in an afterlife that's better than this one becomes a whole lot more pressing. When you look at the red state/blue state thing in this light, it becomes much more clear: Religion doesn't increase the crime rate or the divorce rate. Poverty and despair increase both the crime/divorce rate, and the prevalence of religion.

(More on this in a later post about atheism and social justice.)

I've also seen studies showing that when people have better education, they're more likely to be non-believers. And that's extremely important. If a good education -- exposure to scientific information, methods of critical thinking, diverse lifestyles and philosophies, etc. -- is part of what softens the ground for atheism… well, one of the factors that makes these healthy atheist countries healthy is a high level of educational attainment. A country with an educated citizenry is more likely to be a country with an atheist citizenry.

But I digress, and I want to sum up. I'm going to quote from the study again:

"Again, to suggest that widespread belief or non-belief in God is the cause of societal health or societal pathology is not my intention. Rather, I am simply seeking to clearly establish that high degrees of non-belief in God in a given society clearly do not result in societal ruin, and high levels of belief in God do not ensure societal well-being."

That's the point. The point isn't that atheism makes individuals happy and a society stable. The point is that it doesn't do the opposite. Contrary to the belief of many religious believers, people without God's moral guidance -- or the fear of eternal burning and torture -- do not run wild in the streets looting and murdering and having sex with farm animals. They live their lives; they do their jobs; they take care of one another. They do okay. Quite well, in fact.

I'm going to quote from the study one last time, since Dr. Zuckerman makes this point so clearly and succinctly:

"This is an important fact to stress because politically-active theists often equate atheism with crime, immorality, and societal disintegration. From Muslim fundamentalists in Iran to Christian fundamentalists in Indiana, the argument is loudly trumpeted that belief in God is “good for society” -- an ultimate panacea -- while rejection of the belief in God is bad for society. The above discussion reveals that this thesis is baldly incorrect."

Baldy incorrect.

Thank you, Dr. Zuckerman.

Friday Cat Blogging: Catfish with Dangling Tail

And now, a cute picture of my cat.

We don't take that many pictures of Catfish, since mostly all she does is sleep on the heater. (She's an elderly cat and loves the warmth even more than most cats, and the heater is always slightly warm from the pilot light.) But this pose with the dangling tail was too perfect to pass up.

And yes, we have a little mat on the heater specifically for her to sleep on. What's your point?

Not Just Another Right-Wing Hypocrite Sex Scandal: The Blowfish Blog

My new piece is up on the Blowfish Blog, a take on the latest right-wing hypocrite sex scandal called Not Just Another Right-Wing Hypocrite Sex Scandal. As you may have guessed from the title, I have a somewhat different take on the Larry Craig bathroom-cruising case than I do on the eighty zillion other Republican/ Christian Right sex scandals we've been inundated with. Here's the teaser:

But this time, it isn't sitting right with me. The gleeful Schadenfreude, the “holy shit, not again!” eye-rolling, the cackling over cosmic/ karmic/ poetic justice being served... it isn't sitting right with me this time.

It isn't sitting right with me because of the extremely dubious legal nature of Senator Craig's arrest. And it isn't sitting right with me because of the even more dubious ethical nature of police sting operations on cruising in public bathrooms.

To find out more about why I think this scandal is different, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Carnivals: Skeptic's Circle and Carnival of Liberals

Skeptic's Circle #68 is up at Aardvarchaeology. This is the first time I've had a piece in the Skeptic's Circle -- they were kind enough to include my piece A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside -- so I'm all a-twitter with girlish glee. Haven't had a chance yet to read the entire carnival, but of the ones I've looked at so far, my faves (other than mine, of course) are Medical study concluding for dummies at Med Journal Watch, on how NOT to analyze data (especially when it comes to race), and How God really “works” at Evangelical Realism, an analysis of an anti-atheist joke that completely turns it on its head.

And the Carnival of Liberals #46 is up at Truth In Politics -- sans any pieces by me this time, but it's still a good roundup of liberal blogging. Have fun, y'all!

View from the Fourteenth Floor

I'm working on several different blog pieces now, none of which is finished yet. So tonight you get a dirty story from the archives. Note: This is a very nasty story, and family members and others who don't want to read my porn or know too much about my fantasies may want to stop now. FYI, while I usually illustrate my blog posts with lots of pictures, I'm not going to do that here, since I want you to be able to picture the characters and the scenario on your own. Enjoy!

"Where is my Faith": Mother Teresa and Suffering

This one came completely out of left field. I'm still taken aback by it.

For the last fifty years of her life, Mother Teresa had lost her faith. In private letters to friends and confessors (as documented in a new book "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light"), she acknowledged repeatedly that she no longer felt the presence of God in her life. At all. Ever. Not in prayer, not in the Eucharist -- never. She was tormented by God's absence, described her empty spiritual life as one of "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture," and once described her pretense at faith as "hypocrisy."

For the last fifty years of her life.

Before I really get into this, I have to say a few words about Mother Teresa. If you have an image of her as the pinnacle of human goodness, the compassionate and charitable woman who selflessly devoted her life to others and founded hospitals and hospices for the desperately poor... I'm going to have to burst your bubble. Mother Teresa was a problematic figure at best, and many of her so-called charitable works were profoundly screwed-up. Despite the enormous amounts of money she collected, her hospitals and hospices offered grotesquely inadequate medical care, revoltingly unsanitary and even abusive conditions, and -- pay attention to this part, it becomes important later -- little or nothing in the way of pain relief, allowing the sick to suffer and the dying to die in terrible pain. They were essentially warehouses for people to convert to Catholicism and die, and the conversion part was far more central to their mission than either healing or the relief of suffering.

(There are other problems with Ms. Teresa, including making nice with dictators such as Duvalier; taking donations from savings and loan racketeer Charles Keating and not returning it to the people from whom it had been defrauded; her rabid opposition to abortion as "the greatest destroyer of peace today"; her non-consensual baptisms of non-Christians on their deathbeds; founding convents and conversion missions with donations intended for the hospitals and hospices (that also becomes important later); and more. Furthermore, when she herself was ill, she spurned her own clinics, and sought out the best and most expensive Western hospitals available. For corroboration and more details, read "The Missionary Position" by Christopher Hitchens, Aroup Chatterjee's "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict," and her Wikipedia bio, which includes several references to her critics.)

But for now, I'm going to focus on the hospitals and hospices.

I'm going to focus on the lack of pain medication offered in those hospitals and hospices.

And I'm going to come back to her loss of faith.

Does The Emperor Have Clothes? Religion and the Destructive Force of Asking Questions

Is the mere act of questioning religion an attack on it?

There are religious believers who seem to think so. An increasingly common refrain among religious writers and leaders is that the recent surge of atheist writing is unacceptably offensive and insulting. Intolerant, even.

I'm not going to say atheists are never rude. But much of the time, atheists get accused of offensiveness and intolerance for saying things like:

"I don't agree with you."

'I don't think you've made your case."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"What evidence do you have to support that?"

As Richard Dawkins pointed out in a recent Free Inquiry article, the kind of critical language that's considered shockingly offensive when it's applied to religion isn't even blinked at when it's applied to, say, political discourse or restaurant reviews.

But many believers are very serious about this. Example: A recent visitor to my blog accused me of trying to force my atheism down everyone's throat. When I challenged him to find one place -- just one -- on my blog where I advocated forcing atheism on anyone, he replied that I was "trying to cow others into your restrictive view" and "forcing a materialistic, Godless view onto others by claiming that you know there is no God."

Right. The act of stating my opinion in public is the same as forcing that view onto others. I don't, in fact, claim that I know there is no God, but never mind that now. I am cowing people into my narrow view through the awesome power of my blog. Which is read by hundreds of people every day! HUNDREDS, I tell you! Flee before me, puny earthlings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! I will cow you with the force of my opinions! Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated into my materialist Godless view; for while you may have the infinite power of the Almighty God on your side... I WIELD THE BLOG!

Bwa ha ha ha ha!

That's the modern atheist movement, all right. Trying to destroy all that is holy by, you know, arguing. By trying to convince people that religion is mistaken. By writing books, and blogging, and going on TV, and such.

Of course, this was the same guy who later tried to defend biblical atrocities by arguing that genocide and the infanticide of one's enemies were, in some cases, morally defensible. Thus earning him our household nickname "Senor McGenocide Pants." So it's a little hard to take him seriously.

But Senor McGenocide Pants isn't alone. A lot of religious believers are very angry and very upset over the fact that atheists are starting to speak out: not just expressing our own opinions and theories, but seriously criticizing theirs.

And while I don't think they're at all right to be morally outraged, I do think they're right to be afraid.

I think the act of looking at religion as just another hypothesis about the way the world works -- and asking it to defend itself with evidence and logic just like any other hypothesis -- is a radical act. All by itself, completely apart from any of the specific arguments against religion's accuracy and morality. The mere act of shoving religion into the marketplace of ideas, and expecting it to fight it out with all the other ideas about why things are the way they are... I think people who are deeply attached to religion have every reason to be afraid of that. I think that act has more potential to eventually dismantle religious beliefs than any of the specific arguments leveled against those beliefs.

The New "Zoo" Review

This piece originally appeared on the Blowfish Blog.

The movie is about bestiality.

I want to tell you that right up front, since it takes a while for the movie to get around to it. A little more specifically, "Zoo" is a documentary about a 2005 incident in which a man died of a perforated colon after engaging in sexual activity with --- read "getting fucked in the ass by" -- a horse. And it's about the small group of people -- other zoophiles, or "zoos" -- who shared these sexual activities and interests as a community: talking about it on the Internet, engaging in it at small gatherings, and sometimes photographing or filming it.

Friday Cat Blogging: Violet on the Suitcase

And now, two cute pictures of our cat.

This is Violet, on Ingrid's suitcase. I'd like to think that she's doesn't like Ingrid traveling so much and is trying to tell her not to leave. But really, I think she just likes sitting on the suitcase.

Which, I would like to point out, is not that much larger than Violet. We have some large cats.

Only Losers Dine At Le Cirque: The Stigma on Sex Work Customers: The Blowfish Blog

A recent letter to the Savage Love sex advice column reminded me of a rant I've been wanting to make for a while; ever since I put together Paying For It, really. It has to do with the stigma on sex work customers, and the idea that "having to pay for it" makes you a pathetic loser. Oddly enough, even in the sex-positive community that embraces and celebrates sex workers, this scornful attitude towards sex work customers often persists.

So I've ranted about it over at the Blowfish Blog, in a piece called Only Losers Dine At Le Cirque: The Stigma on Sex Work Customers. Here's the teaser:

Does paying a restaurant to feed you a meal make you a loser? Whether you eat out every night or only do it as an occasional treat; whether you're looking for a special meal you can't get elsewhere or simply want the convenience of getting dinner without any hassle... does it make you a loser? A pathetic nobody who can only get fed if he pays someone to do it?

For more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Literally

No, this isn't about literal interpretations of the Bible. It's about the word "literally."

Faithful readers of this blog will know that, when it comes to language, I'm a fairly ardent usagist/ descriptivist. I think language is a biological function that depends on constant change in order to work. I tend to embrace changes in the language rather than resisting them. I think grammar books would be more effective if they taught the rules of the language as it actually is, rather than as the authors think it ought to be. And I think that arguing "that's not what this word really means," when it's how the majority of people using the language use it and understand it, is absurd. There is no objective, Platonic form of the word "nice" -- it means what we understand it to mean.

But while I am a passionate descriptivist, I'm not a hard-line one. I understand that, while language has to change in order to work, it also has to have some consistency in order to work. If we don't agree on what the words we use mean (as well as on the structures we use put them together), then language becomes nonsense. And while I think it's silly to resist changes in the language just on principle, I think it is worth discussing whether any particular change is necessary, desirable, comprehensible, and/or graceful.

Which brings me back to "literally."

Shout-Outs to my Godless Homies!

A couple of shout-outs to some great godless bloggers. There was a standout piece in this week's Carnival of the Godless, a deceptively simply little ditty from Spanish Inquisitor titled Why Didn’t Jesus Write?

This question -- and the whole host of questions that it raises -- is so obvious, I'm slapping myself on the head for it not having occurred to me before. The guy was supposedly God. He could turn water into wine, feed the multitudes with a couple of loaves and fishes, heal the sick, raise the dead. But he couldn't write down his teachings, to avoid twenty centuries of squabbling and warfare about what he really meant? Brilliant. Go read it.

I also want to say Howdy to Ed Brayton and his wonderful peanut gallery over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. He has a great post on the Wiley Drake/Mike Huckabee kerfuffle, in which Baptist minister Wiley Drake endorsed a candidate for President (big no-no -- religious leaders and organizations can't do that if they want to stay tax-exempt), got called on it by the Americans United for Separation of Church and State... and is now calling on his followers to pray "imprecatory prayers" against the AUSCS, prayers asking God to hurt or kill your enemies. Quote from Drake: "God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God's church... The Bible says that if anybody attacks God's people, David said this is what will happen to them... Children will become orphans and wives will become widows." Quote from Ed: "Very nice, Reverend; I'm sure that's just what Jesus would do."

Ed's piece is excellent, as always... but the comments are off-the-charts hilarious. People have compared Drake to a mob boss and God to a hit man; have pointed out how committed to family values Drake must be to call for wives to become widows and children to become orphans; have wondered why Drake is calling for imprecatory prayers against the AUSCS instead of, say, Al Qaeda; and, in my very favorite comment of all from Zek, asked this question: "So... God told him to tell people to tell God to kill people?" Excellent, hilarious point, and from now on every time a preacher says God asked him to call for prayers, it's going to be stuck in my head.

While I'm at it, Daylight Atheism also has an excellent and hysterical piece on the prayer attack against the the AUSCS, in which he mentions (among other things) a call for counter-prayers from Bruce Prescott of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, and drily points out that, "While I appreciate Dr. Prescott's concern, I can assure him that his efforts are unnecessary."

Finally: A huge, heartfelt "thank you" to Ebon Muse of Daylight Atheism and Ebon Musings. He not only came through in a recent comment debate here on this blog with an eloquent and thorough demolition of the supposed accuracy of Biblical prophecy; he then posted that demolition on his own blog. Thanks, dude. You totally hit it out of the park. Greatly appreciated.

Carnival of the Godless #73

Carnival of the Godless #73 is up at In Defence of Reason. I submitted two pieces for this round, and asked them to pick the one they liked best; but instead they just ran them both, "Someone's looking out for me": God and the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, and Eternal Fire: What Jesus Says in the Gospels About Hell. I'm not sure if they really liked both pieces or were just too lazy to pick, but in either case I'm grateful and am not going to argue. Thanks!

A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside

(Quick explanation: I've been in some frustrating debates with religious believers lately -- one in particular -- and it seems like the point-by-point squabbles have been missing the point. This piece is an attempt to step back from that, and look at the whole disagreement from a larger perspective.)

Here's the thing, Rev. Cawley. I'm not dying to continue the point-counterpoint debate on the points you raised.

Instead, I want to step back for a moment and give you an idea of what your arguments sound like to someone who isn't already a Christian. Not just to someone who's a pretty convinced atheist, but to someone who doesn't know what they think one way or another, who's looking at different religious beliefs and deciding what to think. You seem to be at least somewhat sincere about wanting to understand non-believers, and I want to give you, and other believers, an idea of what religion -- and religious apologetics -- looks like to us.

"A magnetism that will not let go": The Drooling Homophobe Series, Part 764

Do these people listen to what they say?

Don't they know how obvious this "lady doth protest too much" thing is starting to get?

Pandagon has the story of right-wing Christian extremist Dave Daubenmire of Pass the Salt Ministries, who, with his flock, has been on a crusade to disrupt the church services of gay-friendly churches. But that's not even the best part of the story. As is so often the case, the best part of the story is in an almost offhand remark.

In a Bible-spewing homophobic rant earlier this year about a visit to the Gay Pride Parade, Daubenmire had this to say:

"The 'meat' on display will forever change the way you view homosexuality. Sin has no boundaries, no clutch, and no emergency brake. Once you dip your toe into the pool of sin, especially sexual sin, there is a magnetism that will not let go." (emphasis mine)

Ummmm...

Let me put it this way. The straight guys I know who visit the Gay Pride Parade do not describe the event as having “a magnetism that will not let go.” Their reaction is more along the lines of, "Nice dress, dude." They describe it as interesting, entertaining, touching, hilarious, kind of tedious when the "polo-shirted employees of boring corporations" contingents go by, etc. But they do not describe it as a pool of sin with a magnetism that will not let go. The straight guys I know are not forever changed by the sight of gay male "meat on display," and they are quite capable of resisting the magnetism of homosexuality. They find the magnetic pull of homosexuality pretty gosh-darned unmagnetic. That's kind of what makes them, you know -- straight.

So I just have to ask: Do Dave Daubenmire, and Ted Haggard, and all the rest of the right-wing Christian leering brigade, really not know what they sound like? Do they really not see that frothing at the mouth closely resembles drooling?

Dream diary, 8/18/07: The cats' PR rep, and the half-assed prison

Dream #1: I dreamed that our cats Lydia and Violet had hired a PR representative to improve their public image. I was reading either a press release about them or a magazine article based on a press release, and realized that their publicity was being handled very professionally.

Dream #2: I dreamed that I was visiting Ingrid at her new job in the prisons (in the dream, the Chino prison she's been going to all the time was only about 45 minutes from San Francisco). When I arrived, it seemed that the prison was very small (only about 20 prisoners), and security was very lax. The guard asked if I could help push a patient in a wheelchair in to see Ingrid, and when I left, the guard very casually asked if I could lock the door behind me on my way out.

Perfect Porn and Other Myths: The Blowfish Blog

Please note: This piece, and the piece it links to, includes references to my personal sex life, specifically my taste in porn. Family members and others who don't want to read about that... um, don't.

"I’ve definitely griped about porn because it either didn’t push all my erotic buttons just right, or because it grated on some of my squicks. I’ve griped when it hasn’t fallen into my perfect window: the perfect amount of artistry without sacrificing spontaneity, the perfect amount of teasing and buildup to get me worked up without getting me frustrated and bored, the perfect degree of roughness or kink to be convincingly real without being terrifyingly brutal.

"And I — along with every other porn consumer and porn critic — have to acknowledge that this really isn’t fair."

That's the teaser from my latest piece on the Blowfish Blog, Perfect Porn and Other Myths. In it, I meditate on an observation from spanking model Adele Haze: "To get a video that pushes all your buttons and doesn’t grate on any squicks, you have to win the lottery and produce it yourself." To find out why I think this is important -- not only for porn consumers and critics, but for porn creators as well -- read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

"What are we afraid of?" NJ State Senator Raymond Lesniak on Same-Sex Marriage

I cried when I read this.

I'm crying again now as I re-read it.

This is a person who gets it. He didn't always get it -- he didn't always support same-sex marriage -- but he gets it now. Not just as a matter of fairness or justice, not just as a matter of rational public policy. He gets it about why it matters.

It's New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak, in a blog post on the NJ.com blog titled Why not gay marriage? And I'm just going to quote the whole damn thing.

What are we afraid of? That we'll tear the fabric of society apart?

Seems like the fabric of society is already torn apart. Fifty percent of first marriages end in divorce. Less than 40 percent of eligible voters go to the polls. There's rampant corruption in government. There are random acts of violence in Virginia and Newark, random acts of violence committed every day in our cities and our suburbs. Religious figures commit sexual assaults. Anti-gay political and religious figures are caught in the same sexual trysts they condemn in their public pronouncements.

I love my church, being raised a Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church does wonderful charitable works for the poor throughout the world, yet when I attended Mass recently, the priest gave a homily condemning those who do not follow the rules of the Church. Not a word about the gospel of the day, a beautiful reading from the gospel by Matthew on loving thy neighbor as thyself.

I left after the lecture and waited for my friends in my car, crying and feeling abandoned and not loved. But I digress.

Civil unions in New Jersey give committed gay couples the same rights as heterosexual married couples. Except the right to get "married". The very law that gives these loving couples the rights of marriage deprives them of the loving feeling of being married. Outcasts only because of their love for each other.

Allowing gay couples to marry is not going to repair the fabric of society, but it's not going to tear it apart either.

To paraphrase John Lennon, let's give love a chance. We might just find out that it works.

BTW, to the folks in this blog who have been arguing that civil unions should be the legal contract and marriage should be the religious ceremony -- for everyone, not just same-sex couples -- I'd just like to repeat what Lesniak said:

"The very law that gives these loving couples the rights of marriage deprives them of the loving feeling of being married."

That's the part that keeps making me cry.

I don't just want a legal contract that mimics marriage. I want the experience of marriage. Marriage is an institution/ ritual/ relationship that has existed for thousands of years, one that has tremendous resonance in our culture, in a way that civil unions simply don't. Separate but equal is not equal. It never has been, and it never will be.

And I am touched beyond words that this Catholic state senator from New Jersey gets it.

Friday Cat Blogging: Lydia the Watch-Cat

And now, a cute picture of our cat.

This is Lydia, faithfully guarding my laptop case from all who would defile it.

And I would also like to point out: Toes!

Showtime's "Californication": Well, There's Promiscuous and There's Promiscuous

You'd think I'd be irritated by it.

You'd think that Little Miss Sex-Positive Culture Critic would be foaming at the mouth. Another goddamn pop-culture depiction of promiscuity and casual sex as a sign of immaturity and instability and low self-esteem. You'd think I'd have my boilerplate rant all ready to go.

But I'm not. I don't. I've only seen one episode of "Californication" so far -- but so far I love it. And I'm dying to see more.

Quick precis, for those who haven't seen it: "Californication" is a new series on Showtime, starring David Duchovny as Hank, a messed-up writer in Los Angeles with writer's block, a divorce he's unhappy about, a whole passel of emotional problems, and a good book that got turned into a lousy movie. He has a passive, bemused, almost happy-go-lucky attitude about the life that's going down the toilet… and he deals with, or doesn't deal with, his despair and fucked-up-edness with casual, wildly promiscuous sex.

Now, I've definitely had a bellyful of the "casual promiscuous sex as sign of emotional problems" trope. I've seen it dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, and a big part of me never wants to see it again.

But I'm cutting "Californication" a whole lot of slack. It's smart, and it's funny... and most importantly, it's obviously trying to be true. And it's obviously trying to be true, not just about life in general, but about sex in particular.

I was pretty much sold in the first five minutes. I don't think I've ever seen a TV show that featured, in the first five minutes of the first scene of the premiere episode, a conversation about the clit. Where it is; where it isn't, how to find it; what to do about men who can't find it. That sort of thing. (Oh, they probably talked about it on "Sex in the City." I'm guessing: I never made it through more than two episodes of that damn show. But "Californication" makes the glib, smirking fakitude of "Sex in the City" look like... well, glib, smirking fakitude. It puts it to shame.)

And I've definitely never seen a TV show with a conversation about the clit that was anywhere near this funny. I love the moment where Hank and the woman he's going down on are about to be caught by her lousy-lover husband, and he says, "Well, maybe I should hide under your clit. He'll never find me there." (And I love even more the scene where he gives the enraged husband a lesson on female sexual anatomy.)

It just gets better from there. I'm tempted to tell you all the good bits, all the funny and freaky and trenchant sexual moments. I'm tempted to describe all the scenes where Hank's sexual passivity, sexual vengefulness, and honest desire for sexual pleasure and connection, come crashing together in a snarky, detached emotional mosh pit. I'm tempted to describe how he uses both his fame and his self-deprecation about his fame to get women to tumble into bed with him. I'm tempted to describe his defensive unease about his daughter's emerging sexuality, and thus her emergence into a world full of asshole men like him.

But I don't want to spoil it for you. I'll leave it at this so I can move on: This is a TV show that is intelligent about sex, funny about sex, perceptive about sex... and, as far as I can tell, trying really hard to be true about sex.

Which brings me back to the whole sex-positive thing.

I'm not an idiot. I get that drama requires conflict, and a TV show about a casually promiscuous guy who's overall pretty happy with his life and doesn't have any real problems would make for some profoundly boring drama. And I'm not an idiot, Part 2: I get that sex is complicated and messy and irrational, and that people don't always handle it very well. As much as I hate the narrow, luridly moralistic vision of sex that pop culture usually hands us, I'm not looking for sex-positive propaganda either.

Of course I'd like to see more genuinely positive images of sex in popular culture. But much more importantly, I'd like to see more sexual truth in popular culture. Sex-positivity isn't about being a cheerleader for sex, all sex, all the time. Sex-positivity is about seeing sex as an essential part of human life: as diverse as the human race, as ecstatic and sad and absurd as the people who are doing it.

And that's exactly what "Californication" does.

At least in the first episode. I can't wait to see more.

Blog Carnivals: Feminists, Liberals, and Humanists

It's blog carnival time!

Carnival of the Liberals #45 is up at The Greenbelt. They included my piece on the Blowfish Blog, Right Wing Hypocrisy, or Why Sex Guilt Fucks Things Up For Everyone, which makes me really happy since I think that's one of the better pieces I've written of late. Carnival of the Liberals is a very selective carnival: they only include ten posts per issue, so I'm always extra-happy and honored to be included. And they illustrated the posts with cute pictures of dogs in birthday hats, so that's a good time right there.

Carnival of the Feminists #43 is up at Femtique. They included my feminist rant on The Devil Wears Prada and its fucked-up view of professionalism in women, so thanks for that.

And The Humanist Symposium #6 is up at A Load of Bright, with its usual excellent collection of positive atheist blogging. I didn't get a piece in this time -- I've been Miss Negative Cranky-Pants lately when it comes to the atheist blogging -- but if you want written proof that atheists have more to say about atheism than just complaining about religion, be sure to check it out. Ta!

Eternal Fire: What Jesus Says in the Gospels About Hell

For some reason -- maybe it's just coincidence -- this has been coming up a lot lately. I've been in three separate debates in the last couple of weeks -- here on this blog and elsewhere -- in which Christian theists have argued that Jesus's teaching in the Bible didn't say anything about Hell as a place of eternal damnation, burning, and torture... or if he did say that, he didn't really mean it.

I'm not posting this to stir up those debates again. But when I got into those debates, I wound up citing this piece of research I did that got buried in the comments on this blog. I think it's an important point -- I suspect I'll be citing it again in the future, and I'm thinking that other atheist bloggers might want to cite it as well. So I'm pulling it out of the comments and making it into a post of its own.

It's a list of all the places in the Gospels where Jesus is quoted as teaching about hell, damnation, wrath, judgment, etc. -- with brief explanations of the context. (My apologies for any typos, btw: I couldn't find an online version of the Revised Standard Bible to cut and paste from, so I had to just type all this in by hand.)

And it looks to me like it's a very prevalent theme. It's not a small number of passing references -- it's quite plentiful. And the references aren't out of context or jarringly inconsistent -- they're woven into the text fairly seamlessly, and a number of consistent themes emerge, such as people being damned to hell for hearing and seeing Jesus and still not believing in him and repenting.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are several other more indirect allusions to these concepts: implying it in parables, using words like "punish" or "condemnation" instead of "hell" or "fire," etc. -- but I limited myself to the most direct and explicit ones. In addition, there are several other references in the Gospels to these concepts spoken by either John the Baptist or by the narrator/gospel writer -- but I'm limiting myself to sayings that are quoted as Jesus's own words. And there are also other troubling words from Jesus in the Gospels that aren't about judgment and hell but that also aren't in keeping with a message of love and tolerance -- but I'm limiting myself here to teachings about hell, wrath, judgment day, etc.

There are definitely more in Matthew than any of the other four, although Luke has quite a few as well. John doesn't have as many as those two, but the concept is far from entirely absent (plus John does have a fair number of the abovementioned indirect allusions and comments from John the Baptist and the narrator). Mark seems to have the fewest (although again it has a fair number of indirect allusions that I didn't list here).

The list begins below the jump.

Ticky-Tacky, or Why Most Mainstream Het Porn Bores The Pants On To Me

This piece was originally written for Fishnet about ten years ago. A few of the details of the porn industry formulas have changed since then, but it's somewhat unnerving to realize how apt this piece still is. FYI, the videos here used to illustrate ticky-tacky porn here are not necessarily ones that I've seen. If I'm mistaken and one or more of them is actually an exception to the ticky-tacky standard, please accept my apologies. (The videos illustrating concepts of good porn are all ones that I've seen.)

*Little boxes, on the hillside
Little boxes, made of ticky-tacky
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same...*
-Malvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes"

No, don't worry. This isn't a rant about why porn is sexist and oppressive and demeaning and generally a Bad Thing For Our Society. I like porn quite a bit. I whack off to it all the time. And I have a very squishy soft spot in my heart for video porn. Real actual people having real actual sex, right there in real life videotape in the privacy of your own living room -- what could be bad?

But Lordy, Lordy, am I ever tired of the formula. I am so tired of flat stomachs and big fake boobs and long ratty bleached-and-permed hair. I am super-tired of pussies shaved into the Hitler moustache. And Christ on a crutch, I am so far beyond tired of cum shots that I could just plotz.

It's not that I could never find any of these things arousing. I'm just tired of the repetition. I'm tired of seeing the same types of bodies and the same hairstyles and the same four or five sex acts over and over and over again. And I'm tired of what this repetition, this sameness, says to me about the porn industry.

You see, it seems to me as if the folks in the mainstream het porn industry are not really trying very hard to turn people on. They seem instead to be trying desperately hard not to turn people off. The decisions about what body types and hairstyles and sexual variations get put on video seem to be based, not on creating images that customers might find arousing, but on avoiding images that customers might not want to see. The very narrowness of the erotic vision speaks to me of marketing meetings, and lowest common denominators, and fear.

Friday Cat Blogging: Ginger in the Garden! Plus, a brief blog break

And now, a cute picture of a cat.

This is Ginger, a feral who hangs out in our backyard. Our upstairs neighbors feed her and give her a shelter on their porch, and she rewards us all by being decorative in our garden.

Also a quick FYI: I'm going to L.A. for a couple of days to visit our friends Chip and Hayley, and rather than being a psycho anti-social freak, I'm locking the laptop up at home and taking a break from it. (Really -- I can quit any time I want.) I'll probably be back on the keyboard Monday or Tuesday. I'm sure you're all devastated, but I hope you'll find the strength to carry on.

Right Wing Hypocrisy Part Two: The Scary Black Men Made Me Do It! The Blowfish Blog

So the latest right-wing hypocritical sex scandal has gone from predictably boilerplate to ridiculous verging on surreal. You may have heard about it: Bob Allen, the Florida state representative/ McCain presidential campaign co-chair who got busted for offering a male cop $20 to blow him in a public bathroom, is now claiming that he did what he did because he was intimidated by the big scary black man.

I have a piece about it over at the Blowfish Blog: a follow-up to last week's thoughtful spew on right-wing sexual hypocrisy, this one titled Right Wing Hypocrisy Part Two: The Scary Black Men Made Me Do It! Here's an excerpt:

Right. Every guy I know, when he’s in a public place in a situation where he feels threatened, tries to get out of it by offering the purported threatener $20 to suck his cock. I mean, that's just self-preservation. It's not like he actually wanted to suck the guy’s cock. He was simply trying to defuse a potentially dangerous situation.

Really. You’ve done that, guys... right? You’re in an alley or a deserted park at night,